Harvard was still watching their six, waiting for another plane to appear behind them. “I don’t know how you can be so convinced they’re not going to follow, Jones.”
“I am convinced,” Cowboy told him. “What do you think took me so long earlier tonight? I didn’t stop for a sandwich in the food commissary, that’s for damn sure.”
Harvard’s eyes narrowed. “Did you…?”
“I did.”
Harvard started to laugh.
“What?” Melody asked. “What did you do?”
“How many were there?” Harvard asked.
Cowboy grinned. “About a dozen. Including the 727.”
Melody turned to Harvard. “What did he do?”
He swung around in his seat to face her. “Junior here disabled every other plane on that field. Including the 727. There are a whole bunch of grounded tangos down there right now, hopping mad.”
Cowboy glanced back into the shadows, hoping to see her smile. But as far as he could tell, her expression was serious, her eyes subdued.
“We are crossing the border,” Harvard announced. “Boys and girls, it looks as if we are nearly home!”
Ensign Harlan Cowboy Junior Kid Jones landed the little airplane much more smoothly and easily than he’d taken off.
Melody could see the array of ambulances and Red Cross trucks zooming out across the runways to meet them in the early dawn light. Within moments, they would taxi to a stop and climb out of the plane.
She wanted four tall glasses of water, no ice, lined up in front of her so that she could drink her fill without stopping. She wanted a shower in a hotel with room service. She wanted the fresh linens and soft pillows of a king-size bed. She wanted clean clothes and a hairdresser to make some sense out of the ragged near scalping she’d given herself.
But before she had any of that, she wanted to hold Harlan Jones in her arms. She wanted to hold him tightly, to thank him with the silence of her embrace for all that he had done for her.
He’d done so much for her. He’d given her so much. His kindness. His comforting arms. His morale-bolstering smiles. His encouraging words. His sandals.
And, oh yeah. He’d killed for her, to keep her safe, to deliver her to freedom.
She’d seen the blood on his robe, seen the look in his eyes, on his face. He’d run into trouble out alone on the air base and he’d been forced to take enemy lives. And the key word there was not enemy. It was lives.
Melody was long familiar with the expression “All’s fair in love and war.” And this was a war. The legal government had been overthrown and the country had been invaded by terrorist forces. They’d threatened American lives. She knew full well that it was a clear-cut case of “them” or “us.”
What shook her up the most was that this was what Cowboy Jones did. This was what he did, day in, day out. He’d done it for the past six years and he’d continue to do it until he retired. Or was killed.
Melody thought about that blood on Jones’s robe, thought about the fact that it just as easily could have been his own blood.
All was fair in love and war.
But what were the rules if you were unlucky enough to fall in love with a warrior?
Jones cut the engine, then pushed the door open with his bare feet. But instead of climbing out, he turned around to face Melody, giving her his hand for support as she moved up through the cramped cabin and toward the door.
He slid down out of the plane, then looked up at her.
He’d taken off his blood-streaked robe, but he still wore that black vest with its array of velcroed pockets. It hung open over a black T-shirt that only barely disguised his sweat and grime. His face was streaked with dirt and dust, his hair matted against his head. There was shoe polish underneath his chin and on his neck—from where she’d burrowed against him, stealing strength and comfort from his arms.
But despite his fatigue, his eyes were as green as ever. He smiled at her. “Do I look as…ready for a bath as you do?”
She had to smile. “Tactfully put. Yes, you certainly do. And as for me—I think I’m more than ready to be a blonde again and wash this stuff out of my hair.”
“But before you do, maybe I could send my shoes over to your hotel room for a touch-up…?”
Melody laughed. Until she looked down at his feet. They were still bare. They looked red and sore.
“You and Harvard saved my life,” she whispered, her smile fading.
“I don’t know about H.,” Jones told her, gazing up into her eyes, “but as far as I’m concerned, Miss Evans, it was purely my pleasure.”
Melody had to look away. His eyes were hypnotizing. If she didn’t look away, she’d do something stupid like leap into his arms and kiss him. She glanced out at the line of cars approaching them. Was it possible that Jones had cut the engine and stopped the plane so far away from the terminal in order to let them have these few moments of privacy?
He reached for her, taking her hands to help her down from the plane.
“What’s going to happen next?” she asked.
He pulled just a little too hard, and she fell forward, directly into his arms. He held her close, pressing her against his wide chest, and she held him just as tightly, encircling his waist with her arms and holding on as if she weren’t ever going to let go. His arms engulfed her, and she could feel him rest his cheek against the top of her head.
“Jones, will I see you again?” she asked. She needed to know. “Or will they take you away to be debriefed and then send you back to wherever it was you came from?”
She lifted her head to look up at him. The trucks were skidding to a stop. She was going to have to get into one of those trucks, and they would take her someplace, away from Harlan Jones, maybe forever….
Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear herself think. She could feel his heart, too, beating at an accelerated rate.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” he said, gazing into her eyes unsmilingly. “Second thing that’s going to happen is that they’re going to put you in one ambulance and me and H. in another. They’ll take us to the hospital, make sure we’re all right. Then we’ll go into a short debriefing—probably separately. After that’s done, you’ll be taken to whatever hotel they’re keeping the top brass in these days, and I’ll go into a more detailed debriefing. After we both get cleaned up, I’ll meet you back at the hotel for dinner—how’s that sound?”
Melody nodded. That sounded very good.
“But the first thing that’s going to happen,” he told her, his mouth curving up into that now familiar smile, “is this.”
He lowered his head and kissed her.
It was an amazing kiss, a powerful kiss, a no-holds-barred kind of kiss. It amplified all of the heat she’d seen in Harlan Jones’s bedroom eyes over the past forty-eight hours. God, had it only been forty-eight hours? She felt as if she’d known this man for at least a lifetime. She felt, too, as if she’d wanted him for every single second of that time.
He kissed her even harder, deeper, sweeping his tongue into her mouth. It was a kiss that was filled with a promise of ecstasy, of lovemaking the likes of which she’d never known. The entire earth dropped out from under her feet, and she clung to him, giddy and dizzy and happier than she’d ever been in her entire life, returning his kisses with equal abandon. He wanted her. This incredible man honestly, truly wanted her.
His lips were warm, his mouth almost hot. He tasted sweet, like one of those energy bars he’d shared with her. Melody realized that she was laughing, and when she pulled back to look at him, he was smiling, too.
And then, just as he’d said, she was tugged gently away from him toward one of the ambulances as he was led toward another.
He kept watching her, though, and she held his gaze right up until the moment that she was helped into the back of the emergency vehicle. But before she went in, she glanced at him one last time. He was still watching her, still smiling. And he mouthed a single
word. “Tonight.”
Melody couldn’t wait.
3
Seven months later
Melody couldn’t wait.
She had to get home, and she had to get home now.
She looked both ways, then ran the red light at the intersection of Route 119 and Hollow Road. But even then, she knew she wasn’t going to make that last mile and a half up Potter’s Field Road.
Melody pulled over to the side and lost her lunch on the shoulder of the road, about half a mile south of the Webers’ mailbox.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening anymore. She was supposed to be done with this part of it. The next few months were supposed to be filled with glowing skin and a renewed sense of peace, and yeah, okay, maybe an occasional backache or twinge of a sciatic nerve.
The morning sickness was supposed to have stopped four months ago. Morning sickness. Hah! She didn’t have morning sickness—she had every-single-moment-of-the-day sickness.
She pulled herself back into her car and, after only stalling twice, slowly drove the rest of the way home. When she got there, she almost didn’t pull into the driveway. She almost turned around and headed back toward town.
There was a Glenzen Bros. truck parked out in front of the house. And Harry Glenzen—one of the original Glenzen brothers’ great-great-grandsons—was there with Barney Kingman. Together the two men were affixing a large piece of plywood to the dining-room window. Or rather to the frame of what used to be the dining-room window.
Melody had to push her seat all the way back to maneuver her girth out from behind the steering wheel.
From inside the house, she could hear the unmistakable roar of the vacuum cleaner. Andy Marshall, she thought. Had to be. Brittany was going to be mad as a hornet.
“Hiya, Mel,” Harry called cheerfully. “How about this heat wave we’re having, huh? We’ve got a real Indian summer this year. If it keeps up, the kids’ll be able to go trick-or-treating without their jackets on.”
“Hey, Harry.” Melody tried not to sound unenthusiastic, but this heat was killing her. She’d suffered all the way through July and August and the first part of September. But it was October now, and October in New England was supposed to be filled with crisp autumn days. There was nothing about today that could be called even remotely crisp.
She dragged herself up the front steps of the enormous Victorian house both she and her sister had grown up in. Melody had moved back in after college, intending to live rent free for a year until she decided what she wanted to do with her life, where she wanted to go. But then her mom had met a man. A very nice man. A very nice, wealthy man. Before Melody could even blink, her mother had remarried, packed up her things and moved to Florida, leaving Mel to take care of the sale of the house.
It wasn’t long after that that Brittany filed for divorce. After years of marriage, she and her husband, Quentin, had called it quits and Britt moved in with Melody.
Melody never did get around to putting the house on the market. And Mom didn’t mind. She was happier than Melody had ever seen her, returning to the Northeast for a month each summer and inviting her two daughters down to Sarasota each winter.
They were just two sisters, living together. Melody could imagine them in their nineties, still living in the same house, the old Evans girls, still unmarried, eccentric as hell, the stuff of which town legends were made.
But soon there would be three of them living together in this big old house, breaking with that particular town spinsters tradition. The baby was due just in time for Christmas. Maybe by then the temperature would have finally dropped below eighty degrees.
Melody opened the front door. As she lugged her briefcase into the house, she heard the vacuum cleaner shut off.
“Mel, is that you?”
“It’s me.” Melody looked longingly toward the stairs that led to her bedroom. All she wanted to do was lie down. Instead, she took a deep breath and headed for the kitchen. “What happened?”
“Andy Marshall happened, that’s what happened,” Britt fumed, coming into the cheery yellow room through the door that connected to the dining room. “The little juvenile delinquent threw a baseball through the dining-room window. We have to special order the replacement glass because the damn thing’s not standard-sized. The little creep claimed the ball slipped out of his hand. He says it was an accident.”
Mel set her briefcase on the kitchen table and sank into one of the chairs. “Maybe it was.”
Britt gave her such a dark look, Melody had to laugh. “It’s not funny,” Brittany said. “Ever since the Romanellas took that kid in, it’s been chaos. Andy Marshall has a great big Behavior Problem, capital B, capital P.”
“Even kids with behavior problems have accidents,” Melody pointed out mildly, resting her forehead in the palm of her hand. God, she was tired.
Her sister’s eyes softened. “Oh, hell. Another bad day?”
Melody nodded. “The entire town is getting used to seeing my car pulled over to the side of the road. Nobody stops to see if I’m okay anymore. It’s just, ‘Oh, there’s Melody Evans hurling again.’ Honk, honk, ‘Hey, Mel!’ and then they’re gone. I feel like a victim of the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. One of these days, I’m going to be pulled to the side of the road in hard labor, giving birth to this baby, and no one’s going to stop to help me.”
Brittany took a glass down from the cabinet, filling it with a mixture of soda water and ginger ale. “Push those fluids. Replace what you’ve lost,” she said, Andy Marshall finally forgotten. “In this weather, your number-one goal should be to keep yourself from becoming dehydrated.”
Melody took the glass her sister was pressing on her. Her stomach was still rolling and queasy, so she only took a small sip before she set it down on the table. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change out of your nurse’s uniform before you forget you’re not at work any longer and try to give me a sponge bath or something?” she suggested.
Britt didn’t smile at her pitiful attempt at a joke. “Only if you promise to lie down and let me take care of dinner.” Melody’s sister had to be the only person in the world who could make an offer to cook dinner sound like a dire threat.
“I will,” Melody promised, pushing herself out of the chair. “And thank you. I just want to check the answering machine. I ordered the latest Robert B. Parker book from the library and Mrs. B. thought it might be back in today. I want to see if she called.” She started toward the den.
“My, my, you do have quite a wild and crazy lifestyle. Spending Friday night at home with a book again. Honestly, Mel, it’s something of a miracle that you managed to get pregnant in the first place.”
Mel pretended not to have heard that comment as she approached the answering machine. There were only two messages, but one of them was a long one. She sat down as the tape took forever to rewind.
…it’s something of a miracle that you managed to get pregnant in the first place…something of a miracle…
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, remembering the look in Harlan Jones’s eyes as she’d met him at the door to her hotel room.
Cleaned up and wearing a naval dress uniform, he’d looked like a stranger. His shoulders were broader than she remembered. He seemed taller and harder and thoroughly, impossibly, devastatingly handsome.
She’d felt geeky and plain, dressed in too conservative clothes from the American shop in the hotel. And at the same time, she felt underdressed. The store had had nothing in her bra size except for something in that old-fashioned, cross-your-heart, body-armor style her grandmother used to wear, so she’d opted to go without. Suddenly, the silky fabric of the dress felt much too thin.
At least her hair was blond again, but she’d cut it much too short in her attempt to disguise herself. It would take weeks before she looked like anything other than a punk-rock time traveler from the early 1980s.
“I ordered room service,” she’d told him shyly. “I hope you don’t mind if we stay
in….”
It was the boldest thing she’d ever done. But Jones’s smile and the rush of heat in his eyes left no room for doubt. She’d done the right thing.
He’d locked the door behind him and pulled her into his arms and kissed her and kissed her and kissed her….
“Hi, Melody, this is Mrs. Beatrice from the Appleton Public Library,” said the cheery voice on the tape, interrupting Melody’s thoughts. “The book you requested is here. We’ve got quite a waiting list for this one, so if you aren’t interested any longer, please give me a call! Hope you’re feeling better, dear. I heard the heat’s due to break in a day or two. I know when I was carrying Tommy, my eldest boy, I simply could not handle any temperature higher than seventy-two. Tom Senior actually went out and bought an air conditioner for me! You might want to think about something like that. If you want, I could send both Toms over to help you girls install it. Call me! Bye now!”
Girls. Sheesh.
That’s my girl.
With determination, Melody pushed that thought out of her head.
The machine beeped, and a different voice, a male voice with the slightest of drawls, began to talk.
“Yeah, hi, I hope this is the right number. I’m looking for Melody Evans…?”
Melody sat forward. Dear God, it couldn’t be, could it? But she knew exactly who it was. This was one voice she was never going to forget. Ever. Not until the day she died.
“This is Lieutenant Harlan Jones, and Mel, if you’re listening, I, uh, I’ve been thinking about you. I’m going to be stationed here on the East Coast, in Virginia, for a couple of months, and um…well, it’s not that far from Boston. I mean, it’s closer than California and it’s a whole hell of a lot closer than the Middle East and…”
On the tape, he cleared his throat. Melody realized she was sitting on the edge of her seat, eager for his every word.
“I know you said what you said before you got on the plane for Boston back in March, but…” He laughed, then swore softly, and she could almost see him rolling his eyes. “Hell, as long as I’m groveling, I might as well be honest about it. Bottom line, honey—I think about you all the time, all the time, and I want to see you again. Please call me back.” He left a number, repeating it twice, and then hung up.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Part 1 Page 79